Darlene Taylor jumped off the pre-med track as a student when she discovered her gift for chemistry. She earned a PhD in polymer physical chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and stayed at UNC for postdoctoral work on the design and characterization of polymer materials for novel applications, collaborating with fellow New Horizons speakers Joe DeSimone and Tom Meyer. In 2005 she joined the faculty at North Carolina Central. Her work focusing on structure-property relationships in oligomers and polymers has brought her back to medicine, where some of her innovations in chemistry hold potential as smart materials for drug delivery. Email: dtaylor@nccu.edu. Web: http://www.nccu.edu/directory/details.cfm?id=dtaylor.